


Under Your Fate

by surreallis



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-03
Updated: 2008-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-21 01:12:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/219251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surreallis/pseuds/surreallis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He won't leave her in this, her darkest hour.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under Your Fate

  
_(Like I heard her backwards saying I can take one thousand showers and never be clean of course she lied away she is ten times heavier stronger than you found the grave…)_   


He wakes to the alarm on his watch and climbs from the narrow, rough bed. The dirty windows show no sign of the sun. He won’t clean them. He likes the anonymity. When he’s here he wants to block out the world. It’s only been a few hours since his shift ended. Since he crawled home at sunrise and stood under the cold spray of his shower. No dreams for him, not during his first shift of sleep. Later, when he comes home aching from the mere sight of her…

Out on the streets the day is starting. People of all races, all planets, mill about or work. Food is cooking, ships are flying, thieves are hunting. It reminds him of all those foreign cities when he was a young airman, on leave with his friends. Exotic and strange and seemingly full of the forbidden.

It’s different when you live there.

He hits a food cart, hands over his hard-earned money and tucks the package in his coat.

Two blocks from the prison he’s yanked into the alley. They try to roll him, but he kicks one in the balls and wrestles with the other. Still, by the time Jack has whacked one alien head into the pavement and knocked him out, the other guy has recovered from his kick in the crotch. He lands three punches before Jack can kick him in the thigh. The thief goes down to his knees and Jack kicks him in the face, feels the guy’s nose give under his boot, hears the trickle of alien blood. It’s immensely satisfying.

He can taste blood and feel it in his mouth. He spits it out. He feels a bruise darkening on his cheek and another on his jaw. They didn’t get anything from him though.

He walks the remaining two blocks to the prison and gets in line, spitting all the way.

+

  
_(I could feel myself growing colder I could feel myself under your fate under your fate.)_   


They check his coat and the offering that he holds with tight fingers, and then they run him through the scanner. It clears him and they wave him through. He files out into the yard with all the other visitors. He heads toward the corner where she usually sits and finds her kneeling in front of the small fire, her pan of noodles warming over it.

He drops down across from her, and she won’t look up. She never looks up right away, and it drives him nuts. Five long years, and she hasn’t stopped wanting him to leave. _”You should go home. You should forget. It doesn’t makes sense, what you’ve done…_

She still doesn’t know him after all these years. Or maybe he just doesn’t know her…

Around them is the smell of cooking food as families bring sustenance to their imprisoned loved ones. Every prisoner gets a plate of noodles, but no protein, no greens. For some it’s enough, for others… If they have no family to supplement their diet…

He digs in his pocket, finds the yellow vitamin tablet and hands it to her. She takes it from his fingers and her blue eyes finally lift and meet his. He swallows at the weariness in them. Her gaze runs lightly over his face, and she’s learned to hide her emotions well, but he still sees relief there. Relief and longing and something else, something long forgotten in the years of her punishment. Or maybe he just imagines it, wants it to be there, wants to believe that this won’t kill her and she isn’t fading from him.

 _I always knew it would be me who wouldn’t make it out. You shouldn’t be here…_

“What happened?” she asks, and her fingers lift to skim his hair-roughened jaw, his cheek, his cut lip.

“Marauders,” he answers. “I broke the nose on one of them.”

She frowns but says nothing. It’s a way of life for both of them now.

He dumps her noodles into her bowl and then sets the pan back over the fire and starts laying strips of the meat he bought into it. They sizzle and cook quickly, and he uses fast fingers to turn them, jerking back when he burns himself. Sam watches with an impatient gaze.

He takes the time to study her, looking for the hint of bruises, the outline of scars. He comes everyday, and usually there’s nothing, but sometimes she gets angry, frustrated; sometimes someone else gets angry or frustrated with her.

Her hair is combed back over her head, a few wispy strands falling forward again over her forehead. The ends are splayed and rough, like she’s been cutting them with a homemade knife. It can’t be helped.

When the meat is done, he peels the strips up and lays them in the noodle bowl. A little water with a spice packet in his coat makes a sauce they’ve both grown accustomed to. She slides close to him and presses lightly against his side, reaching with eager fingers into the bowl as he holds it. Two fingers work well for the noodles, the meat can be picked up and bitten. He takes a few bites but chews slowly, waiting for her to eat her fill. He can get more if he wants it. She can’t.

She eats carefully, and she finishes most of it, pleasing him. When they’re done, he sets the bowl aside and they sit with their backs to the thick prison wall. Winter is coming soon, and there’s a chill in the air. He eases closer to her, letting their knees touch. She doesn’t move away (sometimes she does), so he slips an arm around her too-narrow shoulders. She stiffens for a moment, hesitating, and he can’t take it. He can’t feel her slip from his fingers when his lip is cut and his belly is full of his own blood. He has to be to work by sundown, and the clouds are moving in.

“Please…” he says, quietly. And she closes her eyes, a little broken, and falls back against him.

Her trial was long and sensational. A little thing, a little glitch, and he couldn’t save her from the universe. She killed no one. Negligence or aborted intent, they didn’t care. She sat in a cell as the masses paraded by, and they tried everything to get her out.

The thing is, the Tau’ri were always a little arrogant.

He was there when they passed judgment and sentenced her to an indeterminate fate. He followed when they escorted her to her new home. He resigned when he realized what it would take to keep her alive. He bore witness when the military delegation came from earth to serve her discharge papers. They washed their hands of her, because they couldn’t do anything else. The alien armada was 80 planets strong.

She told him to leave. He refused.

 _”This ‘never leave a man behind’ shit, it’s crap. I’m not salvageable!”_

 _“I’m not leaving.”_

 _“Don’t put this guilt on me! Jack, please…”_

 _“I’m sorry…”_

But he’s not. He can’t forget. He won’t.

“You’re not going to get what you want.” Her voice is quiet in the chilled air.

“What?” He curls his fingers into the fabric of her coat instinctively. She’s going to hurt him again. He can feel it already…

“By martyring yourself to me. I won’t fuck you when it’s over.”

“You think I’m doing this to get laid, Carter? Jesus…” The anger rises, because she knows where to hit him. Knows that questioning his motives will get him going. And… he almost falls for it.

“I’ll be incapable of loving anybody when I’m done,” she states.

“Now who’s being the martyr,” he mutters, and he presses his lips against her hair.

“Go. Why can’t you go?” she whispers, and he hears a hitch in her voice.

He doesn’t have an answer for her, not even now, so he stays silent.

“I hate you,” she says, on the barest thread of the wind.

++

  
_(like two strangers turning into dust till my hand shook with the way I fear)_   


He knows no one on this world. Doesn’t want to.

He walks to work at sunset and bolts one piece of metal to another all night long. He walks home in the driving rain, strangely content when it keeps the population inside and leaves him alone on this planet that isn’t his.

His bed is warm, his dreams sparking in the darkness of the room. He runs hot and cold, alternately, from the fear of death to sliding deep inside of her, sinking into her like she’s an ocean. He knows her scent, but he’s never known her taste, not truly. He still dreams about it, when he dreams at all.

The jolt between sleep and wakefulness always seizes his heart a bit. What will he find when he goes? He slept late today, the warmth too much to resist on a cold, rainy day.

When he gets there, the line is long gone. He goes through easily, approaches her with a heavy heart. She’s eaten her noodles already and sits against the wall, arms wrapped around her own body, hair lifting in the cool wind. The rain soaks her knees as she sits on her heels, the wall protecting the rest of her from the wet.

She doesn’t notice him until he’s there, sinking down beside her onto his heels, and then she gasps, softly, surprised as she looks at him. There’s pain in her eyes, confusion, longing… relief. So much relief.

She’d thought he’d gone… Finally.

He simply shakes his head at her. _I won’t, you know._

She shakes as she crawls into his arms, her fingers gripping the cloth of his jacket so tightly that his collar pulls uncomfortably at his neck.

“You’d have done the same,” she whispers against his neck, her breath sending a different sort of shiver through him. “You’d have done the same.”

She’s right. He’d have sent her away in any way possible if he’d been the one convicted. If he’d tolerated prison at all that is…

He still knows the taste of cold, oiled steel against his tongue. Isn’t averse to it…

There isn’t much else to say. Fate is a funny thing. And it’s closed now.

++  
 _(leave me broken in a world that’s not my own…)_

He realizes she’s right the day he goes and she isn’t there.

A cheap change of clothes and a government allotted credit, and she walked out of the prison, a free woman, two hours before he arrived. He could have passed her in the street, head down, and never known.

They don’t know where she went, and he doesn’t know where to look. She doesn’t know the city, only the confines of the prison. He walks the streets, looking, never seeing, and she isn’t waiting for him at home.

She didn’t wait for him. She didn’t try. And he’s angry, disappointed, pissed off because she _owed_ him that much, goddamn it. After all he did for her…

 _I won’t fuck you when it’s over. I’ll be incapable of loving anyone when it’s done._

They had years to do nothing but get to know each other. How did it all go so fucking wrong?

He goes to the airport to catch her, but it’s too big, too confusing with its myriad of planets and ships. Destinations are a dime a dozen. There’s no flash of blond hair, no security officer who remembers.

He knows she won’t go home. Earth is dead to her now.

Life is cruel.

++

  
_(I once was lost…)_   


The sand is wet and soft, and his thighs burn as he walks along the beach. The waves roll in with a dull, constant rumble, and between the notes there’s an empty, big silence.

It’s not a tropical planet. The skies are gray and the land washed out, and more often than not it rains. It reminds him of the Atlantic seaboard, the clapboard bars and marinas, the washed out skies in winter.

The house is small and tucked carefully into the rocks and trees.

She doesn’t even flinch when he appears before her as she sits in the front yard staring down at the sea. She looks up at him and then away, and there’s good color in her skin. “I had to give you a chance,” she says, quietly.

“You could have left a trail.” It’s taken him months and months…

“You had to want it,” she whispers.

“I never stopped wanting it,” he says, and there’s tension in his voice. “You were the one who ran.”

“I’m not going back.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

She looks up then, blue eyes matching the ocean. “What do you want?”

He swallows, not at all sure how to make this into something whole again. “You were right,” he says. “I want to get laid.”

The laugh huffs out of her, chokes her a little with its unfamiliarity.

“It’s always been you,” he says, softly, seriously.

She swallows thickly and watches the tide. He waits, because that’s all he’s ever done. He’ll map the stars if he sleeps on the sand, waiting as she decides.

But her fingers slip around his hand, clasping tight, and her eyes melt into his. “Let me tell you about the day I almost died,” she says. “And each one after that.”

He sits down beside her and begins to learn. His footprints in the sand are washed away.

He doesn’t plan on leaving more.

~end~

Various lyrics from Mazzy Star (into dust), Saliva (broken sunday) and Cat Power (gray ice water, metal heart).


End file.
